Making Markets Work

Share on

GAIN wants food systems to provide nutritious and safe food for all. The Making Markets Work programme - supported with USD 23 million funding from six leading donors - explores how markets can be harnessed to improve access and consumption of nutritious foods and reduce the consumption of less healthy foods and beverages.

Markets are influenced by businesses (who produce, process, transport and sell our food), governments (who create policy and set "the rules" of the market) and consumers (who demand, buy and consume food). In this programme, we create a series of new tools, models and approaches to influence these various stakeholders to steer towards improving the consumption of nutritious and safe foods. At the country level, we work closely with governments, businesses, and other national stakeholders to generate and seize opportunities to improve the availability, affordability and desirability of nutritious and safe food. At the global level, the programme promotes learning and dialogue between business leaders, government officials, donors, academics and civil society representatives to deepen and illustrate the conditions for successful public-private partnerships in nutrition.

The Making Markets Work programme is comprised of six areas of work carefully designed to address the key barriers which prevent markets from facilitating the consumption of nutritious and safe foods:

Building demand: develop new models and approaches to understand how we can drive more demand for nutritious foods in a market setting.

Ease of doing business in nutrition: supporting governments to prioritise, facilitate and encourage business action and investment to improve diets.

Innovation: identification of key barriers in nutritious food value chains which require innovation, and leverage of new technological innovations to surface new ideas to overcome these.

Impact assessment: developing new metrics and methods to better understand and map how to achieve impact through public-private actions in nutrition, and generating more rigorous evidence of what works, when and how.

Business and nutrition knowledge hub: building a new knowledge hub to generate and collate information; development of a new executive level short course to share knowledge of what works, how and why in public-private engagements in nutrition.

Business accountability in nutrition: creating a new national accountability mechanism to support businesses in understanding the effect they are having on nutritious food systems and supporting them to identify actions they can take to improve diets.

The work is delivered in partnership with a dozen implementing partners including civil society, business associations, media, research organisations and leading universities.

Photos

Jonathan coordinates the Making Markets Work programme. He is based in London, and manages various internal and external relations. He also supports the GAIN’s offices in Nigeria and Tanzania to develop new projects and proposals which are feasible, impactful and sustainable.